Technobabble? A lot of it really wasn’t in Star Trek. That’s why it was sci fi and not space glop like Farscape. Admittedly, it got a lot more sloppy as the years went on. I didn’t even bother watching more than a few minutes of Yuppy Trek.

Ha. I wonder what most would have thought about the talk on the job some years back: “Bring up the confining load to 50,000 psi.” Various noises. “Bring the ram to 2/3rds of the modulus.” Sounds of hydraulics from the 1947 vintage Baldwin compressive test machine. “Drat! the strain gage just blew. We’re too close to a break to put another on. X-Y chart says we’re about there.” POINK! metal weighing five to ten pounds flies between me and the other engineer, narrowly missing our heads. “There goes our confining load. That’s a loss. We’ll have to do it again.”

How can I babble? Let me count the ways… Starting with the ridiculous inconsistency in warp factor measurement (which I was seeing through and beating hollow in my own self-invented role-playing when ST:TOS first aired, while still in my pre-teens), if I had the time and were it worth the effort I could write you a long list of invented terms in every series and spinoff, terms that have nothing to do with reality. ST:VOY was probably the worst in this. Hey, it was the Trekkies who told on themselves and their beloved franchise on this one. I’m inclined to agree with them when they speak of “technobabble”.

On the other hand, this side of Babylon 5 I hadn’t seen such a consistent effort to be at least plausible scientifically and that is the second most admirable thing I found about Star Trek. The first was its value as a modern morality play, even if I thought not all the lessons were well-thought-out.

What you describe, terminology and all, wouldn’t be all that surprising on Star Trek if it could be worked into the plot. I’m reminded of what Scotty had to do in putting together the whale tanks on that “Klingon rust bucket”.

Part of what used to be in the engineering biz. I was describing what went on during a shear test with a confining load. A sample of concrete would be placed in a steel block that was cut in half, loadings to hold it in place would be placed on each side to a max of 50,000 pounds per square inch and force applied to half of the block vertically to a max of 440,000 pounds would be mashed down on it. Eventually the concrete would break. The X-Y graph gave pounds vs strain. The gage measured deformation of the block under the load (strain), which allowed us to calculate Young’s Modulus for that concrete mix design. The shear strength allowed for several design calculations. It was all part of the fun in the Corps of Engineers laboratories back in the 1990s when useful things were actually still being built by the Feds. It scares me a little that I was involved in the country’s last major public works project— 16 years ago! That is a long time. Congress took care of that type of thing from 1993 to 1995. The government doesn’t build anything much any more, though. All of that money was redirected away from engineering projects like roads, bridges, water impoundments, waterways, power delivery systems, gas and oil pipelines and so forth to special interests like HHS from 1993 to 1995. Soooo: 6000 bridges are in immediate danger of coming down as we speak. 8,000 of us from that agency alone were laid off. Infrastructure went from about 5% of GDP to 2% or so. Just in those 2 years. If you wonder why so much is falling apart, that’s why…

Love Rob’s strip. The pillow cracked me up. I love seeing how other cartoonist’s interpret Bill and Frank, it’s always dead on. Thanks for being petient folks while I attend to real life for a bit, and thanks be to the guest cartoonists!

Thanks for all the kind words, folks! And thanks also to Dave for the opportunity to play in his sandbox for a little bit. Oh, and the pillow? I thought it made sense for Bill to have himself a nice, fluffy pillow, seeing as how he bought all of his “barbarian” gear at a sporting goods shop and uses his longsword to spread preserves on his toast.
Gotta go put my halfling monk on trial – take care, everybody!
~Rob Chambers